Hunter S. Thompson | Guy Portman's Blog

Transgressive Fiction: A History (Part 2)

Mar 23 2018

For those not familiar with this literary form Transgressive literature is a genre that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways …(more)

The following recent and contemporary Transgressive authors are presented in chronological order. Click on the book links to read my reviews.

Charles Bukowski

August 16th 1920 – March 9th 1994

Notable Transgressive Works: Post Office, Women, Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski’s visceral writing was heavily influenced by his home city of Los Angeles. He wrote about disillusionment, alcohol consumption, women, a loathing of authority and the dehumanising nature of low-level employment. His seminal work, Post Office, is a semi-autobiographical account of his years of drudgery at the post office.

Hunter S. Thompson

July 18th 1937 – February 20th 2005

Notable Transgressive Works: Hells Angels, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary

Irvine Welsh

Born: September 27th 1958

Notable Transgressive Works: Trainspotting, The Acid House, Skagboys, Filth, Porno

Controversial themes in Welsh’s writing include drug abuse, soccer hooliganism, sexual perversion, inner city poverty and brutality. His first book, Trainspotting, is about Scottish housing scheme dwelling heroin addicts. Filth has a tapeworm afflicted, misanthropic, corrupt policeman as its protagonist.

Bret Easton Ellis

Born: March 7th 1964

Notable Transgressive Works: Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Glamorama, The Informers

Disillusioned, nihilistic and even sociopathic characters are the staple of cult author Bret Easton Ellis’s books. His most infamous work, American Psycho, caused outrage even before it was published, as many in the literary establishment were disgusted with the sexual violence and what some viewed as the misogynistic nature of its contents.

Chuck Palahniuk

Born: February 21st 1962

Notable Transgressive Works: Fight Club, Haunted, Choke, Invisible Monsters, Rant

Palahniuk has constantly courted controversy with the dark and disturbing content of his books. His seminal work Fight Club is brimming with violence and nihilism. His most scandalous work, Haunted, is often voted in polls as one of the most disturbing books ever written.

7 Politically Inclined Authors

May 08 2015

This is a post that I wrote a while back about famous authors who held strong political opinions.

The following 7 authors were all politically inclined:

Hunter S. Thompson

(July 18th 1937 – February 20th 2005)

The father of Gonzo journalism was an iconic figure in the counter-culture. Despite his love of firearms and ardent support of the Second Amendment, Thompson’s politics were firmly entrenched in the far-left. A sworn enemy of Richard Nixon, he was vociferous in his support of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. He covered the election in dispatches for Rolling Stone, which laid the foundation for his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

Click here to read my review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

John Steinbeck

(February 27th 1902 – December 20th 1968)

John Steinbeck was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, and one of the most acclaimed literary figures America has ever produced. The author was very critical of capitalism and a supporter of unionisation, recurring themes in many of his books. His most famous work, The Grapes of Wrath, was viewed as so controversial at the time of its publication due to its criticism of the nation’s economic plight that it was burned on 2 separate occasions in the author’s hometown of Salinas.

Click here to read my review of In Dubious Battle.

Zora Neale Hurston

(January 7th 1891 – January 28th 1960)

Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist and author, who wrote 4 novels and more than 50 short stories, plays and essays. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. The highly opinionated Hurston could probably best be described as a conservative libertarian. Unlike many of her Soviet sympathising colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston, a staunch patriot, was vehemently anti-Communist. She often referred to them as ‘commies’ and ‘reds’ in her writing.

Maxim Gorky

(March 28th 1868 – June 18th 1936)

Maxim Gorky is one of Russia’s most popular authors. His opposition to the Tsarist regime led to him being arrested on numerous occasions. Gorky, who associated with many revolutionaries, became a friend of Lenin. Later he provided financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Widely accepted as being the first famous Russian writer to emerge from the proletariat, Gorky is remembered as being a lifelong supporter of the Bolshevik cause and the founder of the Socialist realism literary method.

Click here to read my review of My Childhood.

Leo Tolstoy

(September 9th 1828 – November 20th 1910)

Russian novelist Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy is widely regarded as being one of the greatest writers of all time. His most famous works are War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was a Christian Anarchist, who believed that non-resistance was the only way to achieve a Utopian society. His beliefs influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Tolstoy’s argument that peaceful anarchy could only be brought about by non-violent revolution is explained in his essay On Anarchy (1900).

Kurt Vonnegut

(November 11th 1922 – April 11th 2007)

Vonnegut was an American author, whose writing incorporated science fiction, black humour and satire. He was a pacifist intellectual and supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. When he died in 2007 The New York Times described him as ‘the counterculture’s novelist’. His seminal work, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a satire about a survivor of the notorious firebombing of Dresden in World War II. Its anti-war rhetoric has resulted in it being banned by numerous US schools and libraries.

Click here to read my review of Slaughterhouse-Five.

George Orwell

(June 25th 1903 – January 21st 1950)

Author and journalist George Orwell was interested in social injustice, opposed to totalitarianism and committed to democratic socialism. So strongly was Orwell opposed to Fascism that he even volunteered to fight in The Spanish Civil War. His experiences there gave rise to his book, Homage to Catalonia (1938). Orwell’s most famous works, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. They were perceived as being a thinly disguised attack on Stalin and banned in the Soviet Union.

Click on the links to read my reviews of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

8 Authors Who Committed Suicide

Dec 05 2014

Admittedly this is a rather depressing subject for a blog post, but it is an interesting one. Here are 8 famous authors who committed suicide:

Anne Sexton

(November 9th 1928 – October 4th 1974)

Anne Sexton was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. Themes in her confessional style verse included her mental instability and depression. On October 4th 1974 the 45 year-old poet put on her mother’s old fur coat, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Hunter S. Thompson

(July 18th 1937 – February 20th 2005)

The father of Gonzo journalism was an iconic figure in the counter-culture. Hunter S. Thompson suffered from health problems in later life, culminating in him shooting himself in the head aged 67. His ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by friend and star of the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Johnny Depp.

Click here to read my review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Yukio Mishima

(January 14th 1925 – November 25th 1970)

Yukio Mishima is widely considered to be Japan’s greatest ever author. On November 25th 1968 Mishima and 4 members of his private militia barricaded themselves in the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s self-defence forces. Having delivered a speech from the balcony to the soldiers below, Mishima committed Seppuku, a Japanese ritual suicide consisting of disembowelment followed by beheading.

Ernest Hemingway

(July 21st 1899 – July 2nd 1961)

Ernest Hemingway is today remembered as a pillar of American literature. His accolades include winning The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953) and The Nobel Prize in Literature (1954). In the early morning hours of July 2nd 1961, following a period of deteriorating health and depression, Hemingway shot himself in the head with his favourite shotgun.

Click here to read my review of The Old Man and the Sea

John Berryman

(October 25th 1914 – January 7th 1972)

John Berryman was an American poet, scholar, and a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. The poet was a heavy drinker for much of his life. He also suffered from periods of emotional instability. On January 7th 1972 Berryman met his demise when he plunged to his death from a bridge in Minneapolis.

Virginia Woolf

(January 25th 1882 – March 28th 1941)

Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf was an influential interwar writer and one of the foremost modernists of the 20th Century. Shortly after finishing the manuscript of her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf entered a deep depression. On the 28th March 1941 the author put on her overcoat, filled her pockets with stones and walked out into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Akutagawa

(March 1st 1892 – July 24th 1927)

Akutagawa was a Japanese writer, who is considered to be the father of the Japanese short story. Japan’s premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. The author suffered from deteriorating physical and mental health, and at the age 35 he committed suicide by taking an overdose of Veronal.

Sylvia Plath

(October 27th 1932 – February 11th 1963)

Sylvia Plath was well known for her poetry during her short-life. Examples of her early success included winning The Glascock Prize for poetry in 1955. Plath, who had a history of depression, committed suicide in 1963, by poisoning herself with carbon monoxide in her own kitchen. She went on to achieve posthumous fame.

Click here to read my review of The Bell Jar

Transgressive Fiction II

Feb 21 2014

My second book, Necropolis, is a humorous work of dark fiction about a psychopath, who works for the Burials and Cemeteries department in his local council. Necropolis could be described as Transgressive fiction, and it is for this reason that I have dedicated two blog posts to the subject.

Transgressive literature is a genre that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways.

Protagonists in Transgressive literature are in one form or other rebelling against society. Due to this they may appear to be anti-social, nihilistic or even sociopathic. Transgressive literature deals with potentially controversial subjects such as sex, drugs, crime, violence and paraphilia.

Last week we looked at a number of early and mid 20th Century authors, who wrote books that could be labelled as Transgressive. The authors were James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov and William S. Burroughs. This week we continue in the same vein with:

Charles Bukowski

August 16th 1920 – March 9th 1994

Notable Transgressive Works: Post Office, Factotum, Women, Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski’s writing could best be described as Dirty realism and/or Transgressive literature. Heavily influenced by his home city of Los Angeles, Bukowski wrote about disillusionment, alcohol consumption, women, a loathing of authority and the dehumanising nature of low-level work, all presented in his unique visceral writing style. His seminal work, Post Office, is a semi-autobiographical account of his years of drudgery at the post office prior to writing the book by the same name. Bukowski is a cult figure, whose writing remains popular to this day, despite the fact that he has been accused by some of being misogynistic.

Click here to read my blog post about Charles Bukowski

Click on the links to read my reviews of Post Office, Factotum & Pulp

Hunter S. Thompson

July 18th 1937 – February 20th 2005

Notable Transgressive Works: Hells Angels, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary

Hunter S. Thompson was a controversial author and journalist with a penchant for alcohol, drugs and guns. The Gonzo Journalist’s most famous work, the cult classic, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, is about a journalist and his attorney consuming a vast array of pharmaceuticals in Las Vegas. First published in nineteen seventy-one against the backdrop of Vietnam, and President Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs, the book can be viewed as a savage indictment of a corrupt, violent, ignorant, polarised and disillusioned nation, hell-bent on a path to self-destruction.

Click here to read my blog post about Hunter S. Thompson

Click here to read my review of Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas

Irvine Welsh

Born: 27 September 1958

Notable Transgressive Works: Trainspotting, The Acid House, Skagboys, Filth, Porno

As the titles of many of the iconic Scottish writer’s books suggest, Irvine Welsh’s controversial themes include, drug abuse, soccer hooliganism, sexual perversion, inner city poverty and brutality. His first book, Trainspotting, about Scottish housing scheme dwelling heroin addicts, disgusted some in the literary world, was later adapted for the cinema and is now regarded as a cult classic. Perhaps Welsh’s most controversial book, Filth, has a tapeworm afflicted, misanthropic, corrupt policeman as its protagonist, whose pastimes include sexual abuse and gorging on junk good, alcohol and cocaine.

Bret Easton Ellis

Born: March 7th 1964

Notable Transgressive Works: Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Glamorama, The Informers

Disillusioned, nihilistic and even sociopathic characters are the staple of cult author Bret Easton Ellis’s books. His most famous work, the infamous American Psycho, caused outrage even before it was published, as many in the literary establishment were disgusted with the sexual violence and what some viewed as the misogynistic nature of its contents. American Psycho went on to become one of the most influential books of the nineties and secured the author his legacy as an important literary figure.

Click here to read my reviews of Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Glamorama & Lunar Park

Chuck Palahniuk

Born: February 21st 1962

Notable Transgressive Works: Fight Club, Haunted, Choke, Snuff

Palahniuk has constantly courted controversy with the content of his books. Fight Club, which remains to this day his most celebrated effort, was viewed as extremely controversial when the film version was released in 1999, only six months after the Columbine school shootings.

Palahniuk’s dark and disturbing fiction has continued to scandalise ever since. His book Haunted is often voted in polls as one of the most disturbing books ever written. In Turkey, the translator of Palahniuk’s book, Snuff, was detained and interrogated by the police over what the authorities regarded as the book’s offensive content.

Click on the links to read my reviews of Choke, Damned, Fight Club & Haunted

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Transgressive Fiction: A History (Part 2)

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7 Politically Inclined Authors

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8 Authors Who Committed Suicide

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Transgressive Fiction II

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